Does Daisy 'Becky' produce viable seed?

I've been saving it to trade, but a recent post under "New with gathering/saving seeds" made me think that it might be all for naught. Geez, that would have been embarrassing! It is the only daisy I grow, so no cross pollination with other varieities.

Thanks for any help,
Suzy

Great question! I, too, have been wondering the same thing.
Here's a BUMP in hopes of an answer.
LoraB.

If it's a named variety, it's more than likely a hybrid. Your saved seeds will most likely germinate and grow, but the resulting flowers will not be exactly like the parent....they'll resemble it, but like children, they can't be exact duplicates.

Even if you grow no other daisies, it won't matter...the genetics of your parent plant will allow for offspring that isn't true to type. You can swap the seeds, but don't call them Becky....the resulting plants won't be what folks are expecting.

A hybrid is created by crossing two..(or more) plants to produce desireable traits. The seeds produced will bear characteristics of all the parents and will be the F1 hybrid..(in this case, named Becky) 'Becky' now blooms and makes seeds...this is the F2 generation...what you will get in this planting is many variations of the gene pool available...some tall, short, bigger , smaller, fewer petals, more petals...all the variations that you can imagine.....and some will look like Becky.

What you can do, is over 5 or 6 years, by carefully saving the seeds from only the flowers that look exactly like Becky and replanting only them, you can inbreed to the point that you'll gradually weed out the undesireable forms and have an Open Pollinated version of Becky.

It can never have exactly the same DNA make up as Becky, but it will be close. you can then trade seeds and state that this is a dehybridized version of Becky.

I'm glad I asked!

Thanks,
Melody